Santa Monica, CA -- Faceware Technologies, a leading provider of 3D facial motion capture solutions for the video game, film, television and commercial industries, has dramatically increased its foothold in the Asian market by signing two new resellers: Japan’s Crescent Inc., the exclusive distributor of Vicon Motion Capture Systems to the Japanese entertainment market, and Beijing Ou-Lei Technology, Co, Ltd., a successful supplier of entertainment equipment & solutions in China.

Faceware Technologies, which spun off from the facial motion capture services company Image Metrics at the beginning of 2012, offers its technology to the video game, film, television, and commercial industries via direct sales. Earlier this year, Faceware announced the hiring of a business development director in Europe. Japan’s Crescent Inc. and Beijing Ou-Lei Technology are the first resellers Faceware has signed in the growing Asian animation market.

Faceware’s move is the result of increasing demand from that geographic region. While Japan has been historically strong in the video game and 2D animation space, with a continued need for more realistic facial animation, China is a more recent entrant onto the animation scene. In April of this year, Disney announced that it would join an initiative to develop China’s animation industry. That announcement came on the heels of DreamWorks Animation’s announcement of a joint venture with Shanghai Media Group, China’s second-largest media company. Together, the announcements point to a surge in the Asian market that Faceware has felt.

“We have been selling directly to those markets for a few years, but given the increasing demand and the time differences, it made more sense to partner with companies that know the market and offer complementary technologies to ours,” said Peter Busch, vice president of business development at Faceware Technologies. “In Crescent and Beijing Ou-Lei Technology, we’ve found two strong partners with deep ties to their countries’ entertainment markets.”

“Crescent is the exclusive distributor of the world-leading Vicon Motion Capture Systems to the entertainment market," said Hajime Kotani, founder of Crescent Inc. "Faceware's technology not only offers high-quality, markerless facial motion capture; its ability to work seamlessly with Vicon's systems allows us to offer animation studios a far more complete solution for performance capture.”

Adds Lei Xi, vice president at Beijing Ou-Lei Technology, Co, Ltd.: “Marker-based facial motion capture systems are not accurate and very difficult to use. That is the primary reason we decided to work with Faceware Technologies.”

The Faceware Professional Product Line consists of hardware (the optional Faceware Head-Mounted Camera) and software (Faceware Analyzer and Retargeter), which handle every step in the capture and production of high-quality facial animation: facial motion capture, performance analysis, and facial animation creation. Faceware’s Analyzer and Retargeter software are free of charge; however, studios and commercial clients must pay a processing fee for the analysis for the captured performance. The Faceware Head-Mounted Camera is available to rent or purchase.

Source: Faceware Technologies

Jennifer Wolfe is Director of News & Content at Animation World Network.